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Farmer Stories

Tom Craig - Reducing costly inputs and eliminating waste

Northern Ireland
Case Study
Mixed
Dairy

All imagery: Joanne Coates © for the Nature Friendly Farming Network

Located right at sea level on the edge of Lough Foyle near Limavady in County Derry, Carsehall Farm covers 325 acres and is a mixed agricultural operation growing arable crops and keeping pedigree dairy cows.

It’s a family affair, with Tom Craig farming with his brother Robert and his nephew Alistair. They come from a long line of farmers, with Tom’s great-grandfather beginning to buy land on the back of success as a grocery man in the city of Derry. Tom is on a mission to cut out expensive inputs and eliminate waste on his farm, and this has increasingly led him to a nature-friendly approach.

Carsehall Farm’s location on the north coast of Northern Ireland, with part of the farm consisting of reclaimed land, brings certain challenges to farming there. The light soil means outwintering even native breeds of cattle is extremely difficult, leading Tom to conclude that as housing cattle is inevitable, keeping pedigree breeds with higher milk yields remains a prudent business decision. 

We try to promote a circular economy by producing as much feed as we can from the cereal enterprise and by using all our own straw for the bedding. We’ve managed to reduce purchased feed by about a quarter doing that, and we’ve reduced our fertiliser by around 10 to 15%.

Tom Craig

Nevertheless, Tom is determined to make the farm as sustainable as it can be. This effort began some 20 years ago when he decided to grow proteins on-site to reduce the farm’s dependence on bought-in soya. This determination to reduce external inputs was partly a business decision and partly influenced by Tom’s experiences travelling as a young man when he saw forests in Malaysia being destroyed for palm oil and rubber production.

Initially, the farm tried growing peas for protein, but the crop struggled with the Northern Irish weather. The farm has now spent around two decades growing about 25 acres of alfalfa every year, which Tom says provides a good amount of nutrition for the cows without the need for nitrogen inputs. A more recent introduction to their diet is rye grown on the farm, while the arable side of the business is based around winter barley production for seed contracts. The rye has been a particular success from the sustainability and input point of view, as it required only two tractor passes and Tom is wondering whether they could have got away without one of those in which fungicide was applied.

The farm also runs a circular system where the straw from the cereals is used for cattle bedding over winter. Although the farm has the high-yield Holstein breed of cow, Tom says they no longer push the animals too hard for milk production to concentrate instead on their longevity.

In around 2020, Tom and the team at the farm held a major meeting to discuss improving soil health and biology. “The environment was a hot topic, and while it was clear we were all going in the same direction, we thought we had been focusing a bit too much on chemistry, and we could do more to help soil biology,” Tom says. This effort has involved everything from establishing mixed-species grass swards in the pastures to investing in bigger tractor tyres so they do less damage to the soil and changing the plough to a shallower one as part of adopting minimum-till practices.

We changed from a deep to a shallow plough as part of going min-till. Yields are down a bit, but you’re definitely saving on fuel, and you’re saving on time. You need to focus on profit rather than just yield.

Tom Craig

The farm also does foetal egg counts, so worming cattle only happens when strictly needed rather than as a matter of routine, which prevents the wormers from getting into the soil and affecting organisms. In 2023, helped a little by wet weather, Tom says wormer use in young stock fell by at least two-thirds as no wormer was used between April and August compared to a traditional regime of worming every five weeks or so.

The farm has also been cutting silage every four weeks for three years, resulting in higher protein and energy levels, while for five years slurry has been spread on the cereal crops to reduce bought-in inputs. Tom has also switched to liquid fertiliser, which is more targeted in application and less likely to end up in watercourses and which the manufacturers claim has a carbon footprint a third lower than pellets. These changes have had a number of other benefits, such as selling equipment for less expensive secondhand kit and reducing the use of a forklift truck which needs diesel.

Reducing fuel bills, in general, has long been a preoccupation for Tom. “It was always in my head that we were selling barley and buying in nuts and blends for our cows, and someone was still paying for that fuel. Our barley was going 80 miles to Belfast to be processed, and the nuts were coming back from there. We started crushing our own grain and adding that in, and we’ve gone on from there, figuring out how to use more of our own cereals for the cows and grow protein crops.”

Overall, Tom thinks fertiliser use has fallen by around 15% from 150 tonnes to between 100 and 120, and it is hoped that looking at different crops will enable further chemical reductions. They have also managed to cut bought-in animal feed by around a quarter with the use of homegrown cereal. The farm is home to a good amount of biodiversity, including the merlin bird of prey and a colony of tree sparrows. To help the bird life, Tom created corridors across the farm and planted between three and four kilometres of hedgerows, creating features for nature on the open, reclaimed land.

Tom is also interested in A2 protein. This is a recessive gene which is present in older dairy cattle breeds but has progressively been bred out and made less common. However, many people with lactose intolerance are allergic to the A1 protein but not A2, which means Tom thinks A2 milk could be an alternative to products such as almond drinks, which have caused environmental problems in parts of the world, such as California. He originally saw A2 milk on shelves in Australia while backpacking 30 years ago and has been breeding for the gene for around five years. Future plans in this direction could include milk runs and possibly A2 yoghurts and cheeses, which could be sold in a vending machine.

Tom says he believes Carsehall Farm has reached the right sort of size, but this brings challenges to securing a nature-friendly and viable future. “Middle-sized farmers are pushed to get bigger or smaller,” he says. “More than 250 cows are difficult to graze. I don’t want to grow any more, but I’m always trying to run a business. That means saving money by cutting energy use and cutting fuel.”